The sentence had first to be ratified by the King, and the Jewish representatives in Warsaw and Dresden, the latter city being the second capital of the King and the residence of the papal nuncio, employed every possible means to bring about a reversal of the judgment. It was difficult to influence Augustus III., the dull-witted monarch, who, in addition, was imbued with a goodly dose of anti-Semitism. But the noise caused by the trial at Posen and the pressure upon the King on the part of the Jewish bankers of Vienna, particularly the banking-house of Wertheimer, induced him to yield. After a prolonged interval and a second revision of the case by a royal commission, the King gave orders to free the Jews, who had languished in prison for four years (August, 1740). On this occasion he went out of his way to enjoin the magistracy of Posen not to resort to tortures in similar trials, but he could not refrain at the same time from prescribing to the Jews "rules of conduct" after the medieval pattern: not to pass too frequently beyond the boundaries of their ghetto (which had been preserved in Posen), not to associate with Christians, nor caress Christian children, nor keep Christian domestics, nor attend Christian patients, etc. The favorable issue of the Posen trial was due to the fact that it took place in a large Jewish community, whose representatives were able to arouse the public opinion of Western Europe and secure the intervention of influential persons. But in the distant corners of Poland, in the obscure Jewish communities of the country, the ritual murder trials were in the nature of ghastly nightmares. Such was the trial of Zaslav, a town in Volhynia, which originated in 1747 as the result of a fatal concatenation of events. In the springtime, when the snow was melting, the dead body of a Christian was found in a neighboring village, having been buried beneath the snow for a considerable time. It so happened that about the same time the functionaries of the Zaslav synagogue assembled in a neighboring Jewish inn, to celebrate the circumcision of the new-born son of the innkeeper. A peasant who chanced to pass by the inn informed the authorities that the Jews had been praying the whole night as well as eating and amusing themselves, and this suggested to the Bernardine monks of Zaslav that the celebration had some connection with ritual murder, the victim of which was the discovered dead body. The Jewish innkeeper, the Kahal elder, the _hazan_ (cantor), the _mohel_ (surgeon), and the beadle of the Zaslav synagogue, were indicted. The accused, in spite of dreadful tortures, reiterated that they had assembled to celebrate a circumcision. Only the youthful beadle Moyshe, crazed by the tortures, began to murmur something, repeating the words which were dictated to him by the accusers, though he afterwards withdrew the confession thus forced from him.[156] The accused were all sentenced to a monstrous death, possible only among savages.